The PRI’s victory in the Mexican elections: Plus ça change …

A few days after the July 1 Mexican elections — in which PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto won by a margin of three million votes — the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), which organized the country’s elections, agreed to a recount in around 60 percent of the precincts.This concession comes after the independent media, the PRD (the Party of the Democratic Revolution, whose candidate was Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and some civil organizations began to document a massive operation allegedly orchestrated by the PRI to buy hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes through the use of gift card-like instruments brokered through several companies and individuals throughout Mexico. Although López Obrador has little or no credibility when he cries foul because he has never accepted losing an election, the evidence against the PRI keeps mounting on several fronts — which throws the election into some doubt, although it is perhaps insufficient to overturn the results.

What is significant about these allegations is not that such gambits were on full display before and on election day; rather, they demonstrate that in spite of the PRI’s efforts to convince everyone at home and abroad that it is a new party, it appears to be the same old corrupt political party that governed Mexico for 70 years and practiced widespread electoral fraud in the 1980s and 1990s. Worse yet, it mars both the quality of electoral democracy in Mexico and the credibility of the institutions that organize the elections, such as the IFE, as well as the image of the mainstream media and the government itself — both of which appear unwilling to thoroughly investigate what happened and punish electoral misdeeds. (Most of the reports on the PRI’s electoral mischief have been documented by citizens or the foreign press and through social media.)

Of course, the IFE itself does not possess the necessary powers to investigate and punish, and the judicial system — particularly the FEPADE, which in charge of investigating and punishing electoral crimes — does not appear interested in looking into electoral corruption. This unwillingness appears related to a desire to disregard the evidence uncovered by citizens, social media and the foreign press rather than tackle it in order to improve the electoral system in the future. All of this points to a flaw in the electoral system itself, which is designed with an enormous loophole for anyone who would want to commit electoral misdeeds — such as vote buying — before the election takes place. Not to investigate and punish electoral violations, however, is a mistake, given that the PRI’s Peña Nieto won with only 38 percent of the vote (or barely one out of every three votes cast), which already means that his power base is narrow and his legitimacy somewhat rocky. Still, he put on the best face he could before the international media, reassuring Mexicans that he won outright and cleanly. Not everyone is convinced. We will have to wait for the outcome of the recount, although we are not likely to see a serious investigation into and punishment of electoral misdeeds.

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